[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Circ and Placing Holds

[Mike Rylander]

On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 10:00 PM, Bill Erickson <erickson at esilibrary.com> wrote:
>
> Dan Scott wrote:
>  > On 27/02/2008, Bill Erickson <erickson at esilibrary.com> wrote:
>  >
>  >> Grant Johnson wrote:
>  >>  > Hey all,
>  >>  >
>  >>  > I'm still in a test mode and have discovered that placing Holds just
>  >>  > freezes as a patron on the OPAC.
>  >>  > Checking out a book throws a network error in the Staff Client.
>  >>  >
>  >>  > Are these known issues?
>  >>  >
>  >>  > Do I need to get the Circ rules setup before these functions will work?
>  >>
>  >> Hi Grant,
>  >>
>  >>  These functions should both work out of the box, provided you have
>  >>  calculated the Org Unit proximities, as described in
>  >>
>  >>  http://open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=server_installation
>  >>  ("Configuring the System")
>  >>
>  >
>  > Hmm - I see the FIXME beside that OpenSRF call in the wiki. Would it
>  > make sense to add that to autogen.sh (as we need to run autogen.sh
>  > everytime the set of org units changes)?
>  >
>  >
>
>
>  Indeed, I asked the same question.  The problem, as I understand it, is
>  the proximity calculation is very CPU intensive for large sets of org
>  units.  Perhaps we make autogen.sh build the proximities by default, but
>  provide a flag to autogen.sh to avoid building the proximities when
>  unnecessary.
>

It's not the CPU intensiveness that would concern me, but time in a
critical path script.  The method is a blocking call (a DELETE and
then a single INSERT ... SELECT) which calculates the vector proximity
of each possible pairs of nodes in the org tree.  For a large org tree
this can take a good, long while -- it uses the existing (tested,
robust) real-time tree walker SPs, and is intended to be used in an
after-hours, low-load maintenance situation in a production
environment (which is where my priorities will always go first) -- so
I'd be against having the default calculate proximities.

So, having explained the situation a bit, I could get behind a
(non-default) switch to autogen.sh which would request proximity
recalculation.

-- 
Mike Rylander
 | VP, Research and Design
 | Equinox Software, Inc. / The Evergreen Experts
 | phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
 | email:  miker at esilibrary.com
 | web:  http://www.esilibrary.com